Phil Desenne begins with a brief history of annotation tools at Harvard. There are a lot, for annotating from everything to texts to scrolls to music scores to video. Most of them are collaborative tools. The collaborative tool has gone from Adobe AIR to Harvard iSites, to open source HTML 5. “It’s been a wonderful experience.” It’s been picked up by groups in Mexico, South America and Europe.

Phil works on edX. “We’re beginning to introduce annotation into edX.” It’s being used to encourage close reading. “It’s the beginning of a new way of thinking about teaching and assessing students.” Students tag the text, which “is the beginning of a semantic tagging system…Eventually we want to create a semantic ontology.”

What are the implications for the “MOOC Generation”? MOOC students are out finding information anywhere they can. They stick within a single learning management system (LMS). LMS’s usually have commentary tools “but none of them talk with one another . Even within the same LMS you don’t have cross-referencing of the content.” We should have an interoperable layer that rides on top of the LMS’s.

Within edX, there are discussions within classes, courses, tutorials, etc. These should be aggregated so that the conversations can reach across the entire space, and, of course, outside of it. edX is now working on annotation systems that will do this. E.g., imagine being able to discuss a particular image or fragments of videos, and being able to insert images into streams of commentary. Plus analytics of these interations. Heatmaps of activity. And a student should be able to aggregate all her notes, journal-like, so they can be exported, saved, and commented on, “We’re talking about a persistent annotation layer with API access.” “We want to go there.”